While many will cry foul at Animal House finishing second, at least it lost to a very admirable opponent. For my money, David Fincher’s The Social Network was the best film from 2010, and it appears to still have quite a few fans. Perhaps if I had specifically asked for best college comedy, the results would have been different.

This Week’s Poll: Raise your hand if you were surprised to see The Lone Ranger flop at the box office this weekend. No one? Yeah, me either. The Lone Ranger finished second with just over $29 million, barely eking past last week’s hit, The Heat. While its box office performance could have been even worse, it’s still a huge disappointment for a film that cost nearly $250 million to make. For this week’s poll, let’s take a look at films that have been even bigger busts: what is your favorite “box office bomb” guilty pleasure? Do you believe Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar are misunderstood classics? Are you a closet Gigli fan? Let’s hear your thoughts!

I had to wikipedia a list of the different box office bust and I have to say of all the movies on that list: I absolutely loved Treasure Planet. It was my moms favorite disney movie for a long time and it was kind of our “bonding” movie when I was in my rowdy teenage years.

I went with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and John Carter, as both are decent films that suffered primarily through poor marketing and public misunderstanding. (I also kind of liked Green Lantern, but it suffered from being nowhere near as good as it should have been.)

The Spirits Within wouldn’t have had a stellar reception regardless, I think, but Square made a big misstep in tacking “Final Fantasy” on the front. They were trying to gain the audience of their video game series, but in the process lost everybody else, as most people said “It’s based on a video game, it’s going to suck.” As a CG animated movie when those weren’t common, and attempting to portray realistic human beings, it needed all the help it could get, and saddling it with a poor name went a long way towards sinking it. Even the non-prefixed name isn’t all that great.

John Carter was a tremendously fun movie… but the marketing for it was absolutely inept. Disney forgot that most people nowadays don’t know the stories it’s based on. The name John Carter doesn’t mean anything to them, any more than Michael Smith. It needed the “of Mars” attached so people would know what it was from the beginning. If they didn’t want to do that (they gave some half-assed reasoning that he wasn’t “of Mars” until the end), then they could have done John Carter of Earth. Just give something so people know, from the very title, what genre it is. Then do a real job of telling people what it is, and why it’s a revered story. This thing had months of marketing, and it was only in the last week or two that the ads mentioned that it was by the same guy who wrote Tarzan, and that the John Carter of Mars stories were the inspiration for Superman, Star Wars, and Avatar. By that time, the general public had already concluded the film was a rip-off of those films. Coupled with the general public perception that “pulp fiction” refers only to a Quentin Tarantino film, and it was doomed from the outset.

Morgan, you are spot on about The Spirits Within. I don’t think that was a bad film at all, but you’re right, slapping the FF name on it didn’t do it any justice. From what I remember, the film had no connection at all to the video game series either. A real head-scratcher all around there.

I haven’t seen John Carter, but I have heard quite a few people say it was better than they expected. I agree about the terrible marketing. Coming from someone who had never even heard of the stories it was based on, I had no idea what the film was going to be like. I just kept hearing all of the negative publicity regarding its overblown budget and tepid reviews, and that pretty much put me off of it. Might give it a shot now though since it’s on DVD.

A good litmus test for how well you’ll like it is to compare it to other pulp fiction films. If you enjoy old-school (1950s) sci-fi films, and you enjoy sword-and-sandal fantasy films (such as Conan the Barbarian), then you’ll get a kick out of John Carter.

Nice to see The Social Network win,a film I need to revist.
I’ve seen about a 1/3 of those box office busts, yet I barely remember anything about them!
Final Fantasy was kind of a big thing for pushing the visual medium, but the story was just…meh.
I was so looking forward to Speed Racer, and so disappointed by the result, I don’t even think I finished it.

Boy I missed this poll again but I would’ve voted for Social Network too. For this week’s poll, I went w/ John Carter as it was quite enjoyable for me. Haven’t seen a lot on the list so I picked Blade Runner as it was a flop at the box office before it became a cult hit.